This Is the Most Underrated National Park

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 13, 7:30AM EDT

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This Is the Most Underrated National Park — © mscornelius / iStock via Getty Images

Woodrow Wilson signed the bill that created the National Park Service on August 25, 1916. Part of the Department of the Interior, today it manages what it calls 423 units, generally known as parks. Across America, they cover 85 million acres. There recently have been battles about how the parks can be used for commercial purposes. Among them is whether companies can drill for oil and gas.

ParkSleepDrive recently set out to pick the most underrated parks in its “Great Places to Visit, Without the Crowds study.

To select the most underrated parks, the survey examined the 2020 version of the National Park Service’s Annual Park Ranking Report. The methodology also used Tripadvisor reviews that graded parks that are “excellent.” And, in the final analysis: “To do so, we’ve looked at the best-reviewed parks with fewer than 1 million annual visitors (as well as the overrated parks with lots of visitors but low reviews!).”

Most of the parks at the top of the list are in sparsely populated states. The top two are in Alaska. Many of the top 20 are in Colorado, South Dakota, New Mexico and Utah. Some have fewer than 100,000 visitors a year. Glacier Bay, which tops the list, had only 570,000 visitors in 2020. It received almost 93% “excellent” reviews.
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Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is located near the southernmost part of Alaska, south of Yukon and west of British Columbia. It was created in 1925 and expanded in 1978. In total, it covers just over 5,000 square miles, which includes tall mountains and glaciers.

These are the 10 most underrated parks in America, along with their percentage of “excellent” reviews:

Glacier Bay, Alaska (92.9%)
Kenai Fjords, Alaska (89.9%)
Crater Lake, Oregon (87.1%)
Redwood, California (86.2%)
Badlands, South Dakota (86.1%)
Sequoia, California (83.6%)
Dry Tortugas Florida (82.9%)
Haleakala, Hawaii (82.9%)
White Sands, New Mexico (82.3%)
Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico (81.5%)

Click here to see which national parks have grown the most in popularity.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.